The Greens in Germany have demanded that Labor Minister Hubertus Heil (Social Democrats) give women in particular the right to work from home. “Working from home is particularly important for women in order to reconcile family and career,” said labor market politician Beate Müller-Gemmeke (Greens) to the “Tagesspiegel” in Berlin. It’s about time sovereignty and when you work, how long and where.
The background to this is a debate about the return from the home office to the office at companies such as SAP or Deutsche Bank. The coalition agreement already stipulates that employees should have the right to work from home in future. However, this depends on the respective profession. This goal has not yet been implemented.
Labor Minister Heil has so far only presented initial non-binding recommendations on occupational health and safety for hybrid VDU work. This is not enough for the Greens. The party is therefore calling for further protection of the right to work from home.
There has also been criticism from the trade unions. Daniel Gimpel, trade union secretary at Verdi, regrets that the project has been shelved: “The fundamental aim in future must be to enable self-determined mobile working from home.”
Even though I agree that it predominantly affects women who have to reconcile work and family, why do we need to exclude men from it? I stayed with our son for over one year when he was between 2 months and 1 year and 4 months. I’m the one working from home and taking care of him here especially when he can’t go to the day care. It’s me who is shifting most of the work to afternoon and evening. And I’m his dad, I’m also stressed that one day some people will not be OK with me doing it, even though I deliver everything on time.
But anyway, this is all hypothetical because I live in South Korea where all of this is even more extreme. But who knows, perhaps some day we will move back to Germany.
Gonna post this as a reply here so I won’t have to copy this 3 times. Also tagging [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] so they see this as well
The original article by the tagespiegel uses language that makes it explicit this is supposed to include men however their motivation for demanding this (equal) home office right is because women are disproportionally affected by the lack of a right to home office work. The marketscreener article has translated this quite badly imo.
@[email protected] @[email protected] and @[email protected] won’t see your tags the way you posted it, so here.
Not it curiously actually worked for me, but thank you.
Huh, really? How interesting. They show up to me as email links.
They don’t show up as links at all for me, but I still got a notification for a mention. I was also surprised that it worked. Might depend on the app or the instance though. But thank you anyway.
As far as I know, men are not excluded (others may correct me if I am mistaken). The Greens may have said that exactly because women are more affected by this issue as you said, but I don’t think men are excluded from the right. This would also violate the equality principle imho (but I am not a lawyer, so take this with a pinch of salt).
This is populism though, as the main reason women are disproportionally affected is because they more often work in low paying service jobs that can’t be shifted to home-office easily.
I might be missing some additional information but I don’t think men are excluded. I think the Greens are just making an additional point how it’s especially important to women. I haven’t read anything that suggests only women should have the right to work from home.
The argument is that it’s especially important for women, but everyone should get it. German law will not see this implemented for only one gender. They are making the argument about women working from home for two reasons:
- Virtue Signaling to a base that is especially concerned with the systemic disadvantage for women. (In this case virtue signaling is not a bad thing, because it mobilizes voters)
- Because the governing coalition is centre-left the Greens are framing it in a way to sell it to the conservative opposition. For years the conservatives have been arguing about how we have too few kids in Germany and how it’s because women prioritize their career. So this is good framing to onboard some opposition votes in parliament.
“Women [need to] reconcile family and career”
I don’t like how they consider women at all
At the risk of sounding controversial here’s a rant tangentially related to that little sentence strip.
In order to not go extinct (long term) we need (on average and nowadays) somewhere between 2 and 3 children per woman across the entire world. Historically that was pretty “easy” (nothing about raising a child is easy) to achieve because:
- lack of birth control
- women not working
Now while the influence of the former is pretty clear on the birthrate how does the latter impact it? I mean all things considered the women were working before then already, just at home instead of at a workplace. Yesn’t. When women entered the workforce something very crucial happened that I do not see talked about very often but that has very far reaching implications. The workforce almost doubled in a very short amount of time. Initially this didn’t result in much of anything so for most families of the early emancipation the result of women entering the workforce was a massive extra income. Reminder: back then a single income was enough to feed a family (and it was not really hard to do so comfortably). However here’s the problem that I rarely see talked about: the increase in available labor caused wages to stagnate while inflation started eating away at the “real” worth of those wages. So over time the situation went from:
- one adult working, one adult taking care of the home => able to sustain a family
to:
-
one adult working full time, one adult working part time + taking care of the home (usually the woman) => able to sustain a family
Note: see how the workload for women has already increased here, despite various equality movements’ efforts the initial result was/is a higher workload for women?
to:
-
two adults working full time with usually the woman doing all or almost all of the household chores => able to sustain a family
Note: in an “ideal” work household chores should be split evenly but alas we don’t live in fantasy land but reality and such is the situation of things
Notice how the overall workload in this household went from 2 full time jobs (1 work, 1 household) to 3 (2 work, 1 household)? Note: there is a debate to be had about the workload in a household, personally I would estimate it even above a full time job if you want the household well kept but the point doesn’t materially change with household work weighing more
Imo the resulting added stress and discomfort is largely to blame for the falling birth rates in the west. Not any form of “culture” or “rat utopia” situation. Rather people are simply too overworked to have a family.
Which brings me back to the quoted sentence. This piece of garbage text is a symptom of the entire problem. Instead of making sure that one salary is enough to feed a family (again), whoever that one person in the relationship may be, they just keep piling up the work. Women not being able to reconcile work and family is not the problem, them having to do both in the first place is.
I would mostly agree with you. What also is a factor for the declining birth rate is, the invention of birth control(we can see the exact year the pill has been invented in age schematics) and the general eroding of the middle class. The average family can’t afford that much, daycare doesn’t have enough space and and you can’t bring your child to work. Staying at home however isn’t possible, since than you can’t live.
Love your enthusiasm, but slight problem in your argument. Women (or men) might not want to be stuck with the household job, maybe they want to do a different job themselves. Solution? Both partners should ideally be able to work part-time and take on half the household
ugh yes? I didn’t say women should be stuck with the household chores and if a full time position can sustain a family then 2 part time jobs can do the same. I thought that much was a given
Your note part could be interpreted as that, but that would require someone to interpret it in a vacuum without the surrounding sentences.
Just because you think it’s a given doesn’t mean people will be of the same opinion. You have to remember, ‘the norm’ is different everywhere, and a lot of places still have problems with the whole “women being the same species as men, and not some weird mysterious creature” thing.
Trust me, this happens even in civilized places like Germany. Just last Christmas someone who I considered to be a very good friend at that time tried to chat me up by asking to return me a book I’ve never lend him. Turns out his gf broke up with him, and he thought as long as he could get me to meet up with him, he could trick me to agree to be his new gf. He sincerely thought I wouldn’t be suspicious of him trying to meet up for such a weird thing, because in his own mind he simply couldn’t comprehend that I had the “rational thinking” to catch him in the act. We’re both university students btw.
I do get what you’re trying to say, but trust me, people are stupid, and will interpret your words to their liking, and they will usually not give you the benefit of the doubt.
Women not being able to reconcile work and family is not the problem, them having to do both in the first place is.
This is just another attack on women working. Women have always worked, you just want them to go back to working for their husband. Enough with this bullshit. Wages have been eroded by profit taking from the rich, not women. You are no different than the the right wingers crying that migrants stole their jobs.
This is worse than machine translations.
